Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

TMCnet Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

First, for those in the U.S., Thanksgiving has truncated our work week, and we at TMCnet would like to wish you and your families a happy holiday. Judging by the amount of news in just the past few days, the industry certainly has a lot to be thankful for, not just this week but for the year.

The best place to start is with my coverage of what is what is sure to be a major trend in the coming year, the expansion of vendor ecosystems with the opening or extension of “app stores” for their foundational platforms. Community host Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) is once again leading the way with the introduction of Interactive Intelligence Marketplace, which will be open for business in December and features over 36 internally developed and third-party apps.

Expect the rest of the industry to be if not fast-followers, certainly imitators.

TMCnet Contributor Tracey Schelmetic reported on a new study by workforce optimization provider Verint which found that 32 percent of customers share customer service experiences via social media. In other words, focusing on improving the customer experience is critical to your brand reputation.

Some NYC residents accusing New York's 911 call center of failing them during Hurricane Sandy, an accusation which Mayor Michael Bloomberg (News - Alert) immediately denied when he stated the over $1 billion upgrade to the system worked very well considering the unprecedented call volumes it was able to handle.

Automated testing company Cyara published a customer success story on a recent IVR and contact center technology upgrade for a major financial institution.

Supporting over 50 clients with nearly 1000 employees, Roseburg, Oregon-based First Call Resolution (FCR) – a call center services company upgraded its customer interactions capabilities with the help of local cloud-based provider Rio Networks.

The proper handling of customer interactions can cost time, money and ultimately customer loyalty. This is why Gfk User Centric has developed a way for contact centers to spend their human capital in the least wasteful way possible.

UK's C3 launched a new version of Fusion IVR that includes the addition of a call center application that can transform the most basic IVR service into a fully-functioning call center, simply by dragging and dropping the node set to the relevant point in the script.

Tadiran (News - Alert) Telecom announced that the Chinese State Grid power has certified the company's Aeonix UC&C solution for use in China.

Weekend and holiday reading

If you have the time for some industry reading during for what many of us will be a long weekend, I would first recommend my article from a few weeks back, “Who Owns the Customer Experience? Hint, Customers Do.” Plus, the community is filled with updated materials which include new videos, whitepapers and podcasts on a variety of subjects. In fact, it would be a great time to take the Web out for a QuickSpin.

And if you’re a Microsoft Lync customer, download the featured whitepaper from the community on integrating Lync with Interactive Intelligence’s CIC.

Other recommended items includes: The “Ask the Experts” item on mobile customer service; the recently concluded webinar, Best Practices for Evaluating a New Contact Center Solution: Leading Analysts Share Their Insight and Research, as well as the webinar,The Call Center is Dead, Long Live the Contact Center!

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida. Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.

Related Contact Center Solutions Articles

The moniker smart is now attached to phones, TVs, homes and even cars. As the size of computer processors get even smaller, more products will be embedded with the technology to make them smarter to deliver improved efficiency and productivity for many different industries. For contact centers, the goal is to always improve customer service, and then new Plantronics next-generation USB audio processor not only increases the effectiveness of service center operations, but it makes customer intera…
[ Read More ]

We are all familiar with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems as the first thing we typically encounter when calling a contact center. The fact of the matter is that today's IVR capabilities can do a lot more than just give us options for directing calls to the appropriate resources. They are in fact valuable tools for contact center administrators in terms of improving the customer experience. In fact, as illustrated by the recent announcement by Reston, VA-based cloud-based customer care s…
[ Read More ]

A few weeks ago collaboration, communications and customer engagement solutions provider Interactive Intelligence hosted a jam-packed webinar called What's New for Contact Centers in 2015 and Why it Matters. If you missed this event, you can still watch and listen to the archived version, and it is highly recommended to say the least.
[ Read More ]